Eternal Threads Preview: Kind of Like a Time-Traveling Gone Home
In Eternal Threads, your goal is to travel back in time and save six people from a burning boarding house in Manchester. Easy enough, right? Just quench the flames and make sure the firefighters are in position. Alas, before warping back to the mid 2010s, your handler makes it clear that you cannot simply stamp out the fire. Instead, you'll need to carefully edit a series of decisions made by the residents over the course of a week which imperceptibly added up to the tragedy. You know that old adage about a butterfly batting its wings and causing a hurricane halfway around the world? That's the spirit of Eternal Threads; benign decisions, disastrous consequences.
After an hour with the game I was already smitten with Eternal Threads' core premise. The game plays out like the dirgeful, wondrously lo-fi Return of the Obra-Dinn; you are sent to this smoldering building with a portable chronology-altering device, and can rewatch various different events and interactions over the course of the timeline. Some of these sequences are fairly ordinary and ancillary, like a couple of roommates enjoying a late-night drink in the communal kitchen. Others are far more substantial and nudge your detective closer to the truth, like the implication that one of the residents is suffering from hallucinations.
Sometimes I was allowed to modify what happened over the course of these events, akin to switching train tracks on a cosmic scale. One of our lost souls apparently decided to text an old, unhinged lover after a night of drinking. I stepped in and neutralized that terrible choice, which rippled down the newly patchworked chronosphere. Eternal Threads' timeline is pockmarked with all sorts of potential plot points, which will only be
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